We are more different now than when we were kids, but that’s the way old friends work, I think. With new friends, what you have in common is more circumstantial: colleges, jobs, hobbies, acquaintances-of-the-hour. What old friends share goes deeper than that, Your lives can branch off in completely different directions, but always you share that knot of a past — heartbreaks and sleep overs and screened-in porches — and the raw, peculiar memory of yourself which, in part, belongs to them."